As the internet continues to grow in popularity and pervasiveness so do the products and services that use it. The large number of internet users spread throughout the world and the wide variety of hardware components and software used therein presents numerous opportunities for media streams to become impaired. Such impairments may include low signal levels, high noise levels, or low mean opinion scores. The impairments may, for example, be caused by packet loss between the two endpoints, excessive traffic at any of the components between the two endpoints, endpoints out of sync with each other, or incompatible hardware or software between the two endpoints or other components. One common tool used to help assess the cause of the impairment is a trace route. A trace route may be used to determine the path used by a communication to reach a particular endpoint. Once a trace route has been initiated by an endpoint the trace route typically progresses along the same path used by communications sent from that endpoint. Endpoints typically initiate a trace route towards a remote endpoint when the endpoint receives a quality impaired communication from the remote endpoint.
However, it may be the case that communications sent from a first endpoint to a second endpoint take a different path than communications sent from the second endpoint to the first endpoint. Thus, if the first endpoint detects an impairment in a communication sent from the second endpoint and initiates a trace route, the first endpoint is not guaranteed that the path of the trace route will be the same as the path of the impaired communication.